And I understand the question, but I have come to believe it rests on a false premise, the premise that love and structure are opposites, that a home held together by clear agreements is somehow less loving than one held together by unspoken assumptions.

In my experience, the opposite is true.

For six months, our home had been held together by unspoken assumptions, by the warm fuzzy language of love and family and we’re all just adjusting, and under the cover of all that warmth, a profound injustice had been allowed to grow, because no one had ever named the actual terms.

The unspoken assumption, the loving, structure-free assumption, was that I would carry everything while Julian carried nothing.

It was the absence of a contract that had enabled the exploitation, not the presence of one.